Agriculture officials have quarantined 28 beef cattle on a Pennsylvania farm after wastewater from a nearby gas well leaked into a field and came in contact with the animals.

The state Department of Agriculture said the action was its first livestock quarantine related to pollution from natural gas drilling. Although the quarantine was ordered in May, it was announced Thursday.

A mere taste of what's to come from natural-gas fracking in the Marcellus Shale, folks.

With fracking, or hydraulic fracturing of rock formations to extract natural gas, we're setting ourselves up for an environmental disaster of epic proportions -- and much of it the result of an inability to develop rural economies. Residents in upstate New York and central Pennsylvania are desperate for income, and the gas companies are happy to write checks for mineral rights. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania and New York are in the middle of state budget crises. The prospect of tax revenue from fracking is apparently more than enough to offset environmental concerns.

In fairness, both states are paying attention to the risks of water contamination, but they may both conclude that a little water contamination is a small price to pay for a balanced budget and increased rural incomes (at least for leaseholders). Pennsylvania is already experiencing pushback from gas companies who say the state's drilling regulations for drinking water protection in Marcellus Shale regions are unreasonably high. Complicating matters further is that both the New York City and Delaware Valley watersheds are likely to gain special protections, which leaves areas outside those regions more vulnerable to lenient standards. Ya gotta drill somewhere!

Nightmare scenarios abound. As High Country News summarizes, fracking has brought the West "polluted wastewater problems, large scale habitat disturbance, methane leaks from pipelines, and potentially serious health impacts that come along with the use of toxic chemicals in hydraulic fracturing." And as this article on Civil Eats suggests, even heavily regulated fracking could be enough to destroy much of New York's Hudson Valley farmland. After all, how many cattle quarantines or lost crops does it take to put a farmer out of business? Answer: not many.

Indeed, this latest episode, despite the fact that the cattle don't yet seem to have been harmed, will give little comfort to those who have to listen to industry assurances of safety. Would you want to eat cows that have been dining in fields covered in benzene and diesel fuel?

My hope is that the tactics the energy industry have used to exploit natural resources to great success out West won't work back East, where they are operating much closer to media and population centers. But betting on the strength of politicians' spines to resist doing the bidding of the energy industry never made anyone any money ...

This is one point of view. Contamination from fraking is rare or common...we really don't know because complaints are often settled out of court by the oil/gas companies and there's not extensive regulation of the industry.

I think that any true conservative would believe that nobody has a right to inject something--which might intrude into your water supply--into the ground without revealing what it is. There's also an obligation against negligence, which means sufficient study and protection should be required prior to threatening other peoples' health and property rights.

8
posted on 07/10/2010 2:41:33 PM PDT
by Gondring
(Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)

Willie,
Just how deep are these wells that they’re frackin’? How close to the surface are they placing the charges? I run a water company servicing 500 homes. When they started drillin’ gas wells near by, I expressed my concern. They told me that the gas wells would be thousands of feet deeper than my 275’ deep wells, and there was no concern at all about contamination.. nonetheless, as I was leaving their engineer’s office I mentioned that if they screwed up, I was gonna be the new owner of their company. So far, 10 years, no problems, but also no frackin’ that I’m aware of. Edge of the Cuyahoga River Valley.

If a fracking leak was really that dangerous to cattle, 90% of the cattle in Texas would be dead. Heck its common for ranchers to be happy to get drilling pit water spread over their pastures. Even if there is a saltwater spill on the pasture, unless its ongoing, there’s little harm to cattle or the grasses. Just because they let us eat em, don’t mean they’re stupid enough to drink poison water!

12
posted on 07/10/2010 2:43:52 PM PDT
by dusttoyou
(libs are all wee wee'd up and no place to go)

And as this article on Civil Eats suggests, even heavily regulated fracking could be enough to destroy much of New York's Hudson Valley farmland. After all, how many cattle quarantines or lost crops does it take to put a farmer out of business? Answer: not many.

Migration of fruits, nuts, and flakes out of New York City is a far greater threat to the Hudson Valley than fracking!

13
posted on 07/10/2010 2:44:07 PM PDT
by Gondring
(Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)

LOL...it’s not necessarily the cattle or grasses that are harmed...it’s the red-blooded American carnivores who eat them!

I had a site (not fracking, but another “harmless waste” case) where the family stopped eating their own cattle when they started having more and more cancer in the family..but that didn’t stop them from selling their stock to others.

15
posted on 07/10/2010 2:47:02 PM PDT
by Gondring
(Paul Revere would have been flamed as a naysayer troll and told to go back to Boston.)

Strata where water is are likely to be segregated. Yes, contamination does happen, but not often, and if it does it is because —as in the Gulf—some bookkeeper was trying to cut corners. Better get used to relatively clean water. Human beings, really, have never known anything else.

What we have here is the latest fad among tight sphinctered women who insist on making a difference and are very gullible
They tire of the old water monitoring where they wade in creeks and count larvae.

They are all American enemies of the very worst sort. They are unfit to breathe American air or drink American water

21
posted on 07/10/2010 2:55:24 PM PDT
by bert
(K.E. N.P. N.C. +12 ..... The winds of war are freshening)

Yep - there is a bigger picture here. The Administration is trying to cripple virtually all domestic energy sources that are economically feasible in their rush to kill the economy and push the bogus “green energy” agenda. I was only being slightly facetious in my earlier response - fracking truly is a cost/benefit issue. The idea of injecting chemicals underground raises issues; however, the track record of fracking is very good when you consider that the chemicals are usually being injected thousands of feet below the water table. Certainly it needs to be monitored, but these scare stories are designed to kill the practice, which has the effect of putting off limits VAST amounts of domestic energy sources. Just what’s going on with the BP Gulf disaster - clearly something has gone very, very wrong there, but thousands of wells have been drilled without this consequence. Looks like BP cut corners and deserves every liability it incurs, but is that a reason to kill offshore drilling? Only if you ignore cost/benefit analysis and are trying to pursue a greater Marxist agenda.

Sometime the purists are right. Smoking is very bad for your health. Still for hundreds of years, it wasn’t what killed people, and it gave lots of people a drug that made them function better. It is a dangerous world. I’d be more worried about T.B. that is resistant to drugs. We are always at war with nature. We win battles, but never the war.

Sometime the purists are right. Smoking is very bad for your health. Still for hundreds of years, it wasn’t what killed people, and it gave lots of people a drug that made them function better. It is a dangerous world. I’d be more worried about T.B. that is resistant to drugs. We are always at war with nature. We win battles, but never the war.

I’m in the Marcellus region. There is also a lot of shallow well activity in which fracking is used. There have been wells contaminated. By far most are not. The Oil company is liable for any problems. They are required to notify the surface owners and test any wells within 1000’.

26
posted on 07/10/2010 3:01:24 PM PDT
by Kinzua
(Are you ready to admit that electing Obama was a mistake?)

Urban legend scare story. Everything and anything can kill you. There is no total safety guarantee, government regs or no. Don’t move off your couch. You might die. IF you don’t move off your couch you might die. Good luck.

An oil and gas company recently fracked a “shallow” well on my property, just over 200’ horizontally (min by law) from my water well. They drilled to a depth of about 2500’ and fracked in several zones from that depth upward. In this case, less than 1/2 mile down. I still have a great water well (tested). I don’t really care for the eyesore though.

34
posted on 07/10/2010 3:10:35 PM PDT
by Kinzua
(Are you ready to admit that electing Obama was a mistake?)

The sanitation engineer is civilization’s unsung hero. It occurs to me I know of many famous people who contributed to “progress” but I don’t know the name of the men who created the water/sewerage system for the City of London/New York. But their achievement was as important as that of the men who built the Panama Canal.

Indeed, this latest episode, despite the fact that the cattle don't yet seem to have been harmed, will give little comfort to those who have to listen to industry assurances of safety. Would you want to eat cows that have been dining in fields covered in benzene and diesel fuel?

Thanks for the heads up. I was trying to find more specifics for the waste water release near the cattle and ran across some articles that might interest you. The first was very interesting in that it states: "In Pennsylvania, more than three million residents rely on private wells for essential sources of potable water  second most in the entire nation behind Michigan.": About that Water in Your Well That's a lot of wells, and it says that 20,000 new wells are drilled every year in PA! So, I can see the concern for protecting the ground water. But the head of the DEP has posted some observations that fracking is having no impact: In His Own Words: PA DEP Regulator Separates Fact from Fiction on the Marcellus I would be interested to know what you think of these articles, which seem to be from the pro-drilling faction. I am still seeking any technical reports regarding the issue, but it is slow going.

While I am sick of the Left’s full frontal assault on this nation, facking DOES cause issues (though I’m not saying the initial post falls in that category).

Right here in Arkansas - in the “Fayetteville Shale Fields”, there are landowners who have had reliable and good clean wells for a very long time - that once gas drilling with the accompanying fracturing came along, their wells went from good water to water with definite oily residue, off-color sediment, strong sulfur smell, and really awful taste. Others, even relatively closer to the drilling sites have had no change in their well water.

But the point is - it CAN cause troubles (we are dealing with semi-unpredictable layers of rock). Maybe some of those folks with the spoiled wells were close to having troubles anyway - who knows, but regardless, it is hard to ignore it when wells turn bad so quickly after being clean for so long.

WE have to get our energy from somewhere - and windmills can only provide so much from a practical standpoint. WE must utilize the energy sources God gave us -in as reasonable and safe a manner as we can. Going cheap on safety equipment while drilling 5000+ foot wells in the Gulf is a bad idea. Widespread drilling and fracking also has risks. But the option is to just sell what little remains of our national sovereignty and way of life and join the 3rd world. What will it be?

41
posted on 07/10/2010 3:27:39 PM PDT
by TheBattman
(They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature...)

They've been fracking the hell out of us here in North Central Texas (Barnett Shale) with no problem. In fact I think this was one of the areas where extensive horizontal hydraulic fracturing was pioneered. I live in a semirural, mixed in with residential, area with some streams, some agriculture (cattle, hayfields) and various other mixed land usage. There are fracking wells all over the place, and no real problems.

It's pretty much only the hippie leftists down in Austin, and the occassional fear mongering journalist, pitching the horror stories.

42
posted on 07/10/2010 3:31:21 PM PDT
by Stultis
(Democrats. Still devoted to the three S's: Slavery, Segregation and Socialism.)

"The holding pond was collecting flowback water from the hydraulic fracturing process on a well being drilled by East Resources Inc. Grass was killed in a roughly 30-foot-by-40-foot area where the wastewater pooled. Although no cows were seen drinking the wastewater, tracks were found throughout the pool, and the cattle had access to it for at least three days until the gas company erected a snow fence around it. Testing showed the wastewater contained chloride, iron, sulfate, barium, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sodium, strontium and calcium. Redding said the main element of concern is the heavy metal strontium, which can be toxic to humans, especially children.": Cattle may have drunk well water Since the article doesn't list concentrations of contaminants, it is impossible to tell if they exceeded drinking water standards for cattle. The report by the company contained a little more information: East Resources Inc Questions Basis for PA Department of Agriculture Cattle Quarantine Appears to be much ado about nothing. FYI, strontium is a common element is present most everywhere from 100-1400 ppm : GLOBAL DISTRIBUTION OF ELEMENTS

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